


Consumed

by afterandalasia



Category: Cinderella (1950)
Genre: Cannibalism, Community: dark_fest, Dark, Dark Character, Gen, Murder, Past Abuse, References to Suicide, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-01
Updated: 2012-04-01
Packaged: 2017-11-02 21:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cinderella was just biding her time to get her revenge on her wicked stepmother and stepsisters. Now that she's Queen, she's got the power to do it.</p><p>From dark-fest at Livejournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consumed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BradyGirl_12](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BradyGirl_12/gifts).



They thought that she was broken.  
  
She did not blink her pretty blue eyes when they ordered her around like a servant. When they threw things at her, she calmly picked them up and made piles of them once again. She sang when the world was quiet; perhaps they imagined that it was the songs which filled her head when they shouted and she waited, placid, not even speaking back.  
  
They did not understand that there were sounds more beautiful than song.  
  
The Prince loved her flawlessly. It was a welcome change, quite wonderful; when he kissed her hand or stroked her cheek, she felt the warmth that she had not known in years gently swell over her. Like holding a candle in a darkened room, it picks out the shape of her heart, and she remembers what it is to feel once again.  
  
The world had been so cold. Marble floors and cold water, thin rags that did nothing to hold back the chill. Cinderella found herself remembering what warmth was, and revelling in it.  
  
One thing that escaped many, though, was how many different forms of warmth were waiting to be found. The warmth of the sunlight, waxing and waning throughout the year, distant in the winter but strong enough to burn in the summer. She supposed that was what love felt like: always there, but some times more tangible than others, feeding the whole world. The warmth of the body, constant through life and leaving slowly after death; she imagined that this was the warmth of memory, the way that whilst the women she would not call family had screamed and ordered and beaten she had held to herself, and allowed herself to be elsewhere.  
  
Then she remembered the warmth of fire, that moment when it licks the skin just before the pain starts. In her mind, she replayed that moment when the match snaps from its comb to stand ready in the fingers, a promise of flame bundled up in a little strip of wood.  
  
As far as the court and country were concerned, she was nothing but an orphaned serving girl who had entranced the Prince himself. As long as it was clear to all that they were in love, none seemed to mind; the fact that she had no designs upon the throne herself was only in her favour. From a distance she watched as the house that had been her father’s and grandfather’s decayed, the gardens growing wild, until finally the Lady Tremaine was forced to sell it and move to a house, little more than a shack, on the forest edge.  
  
Cinderella looked fondly around the Palace, and suggested to the housekeeper and butler that the servants should be paid a little more, and have an extra half-day off a week. She was so charming that none of them could refuse. It was appreciated more when the winter came on, cold and hard, freezing the river and falling animals in the field. Bread became harder and harder to obtain, and she made sure that the servants of the Palace got their share.  
  
There were many people known to the King and Prince, with whom Cinderella now also found herself familiar. Not all of them were meant to be known to her, either. It was there that she met the once-soldier Abalarde, who now, it was said, dealt with matters that would otherwise have troubled the ruling family.  
  
She knew immediately that he was what she needed.  
  
A whisper in his ear, coins across his palm, and an agreement is made. Anastasia had been the least cruel to her, Cinderella decided, and so to her it was decided the matter would be the most merciful. A hand across her mouth and a knife across her throat made for an easy, peaceful death. Cinderella had asked, at least, that it would be so.  
  
She arranged the rest to be heard at trial.  
  
“To kill your own daughter, your own sister,” the judge said to the thin women in the dock, “is bad enough. To have eaten her flesh…”  
  
One of the women in the gallery swooned. Cinderella gripped her husband’s hand tighter, and he hushed her as he drew her to his chest. She had only asked to come because she remembered the women from her childhood.  
  
The warmth of his arms surrounded her, but Cinderella felt another heat deep within her. She hid her smile in his chest as she felt the burning begin.  
  
Once, and only once, she visited them in prison as they waited for the noose. Or at least she was supposed to do so. Drizella, a coward to the end, had already hanged herself with her own stockings.  
  
Lady Tremaine sat alone in the cell, her cane long gone now, dressed only in a white cotton gown that did nothing to keep out the cold. The tips of her fingers had begun already to turn black with frostbite, her hair matted now into its shape. Even the other prisoners despised her, it was said.  
  
She looked up, and her eyes were still as cold as steel. Cinderella did not flinch from where she stood at the door to the cell. “Will you send me to the gallows, Your Majesty?” she said. Her voice was still as cold as the room in which she sat, billowing in smoke from her mouth. She always had been made of steel. “With my daughters dead already, it is not as if I had anything to wait for, after all.”  
  
“ ‘As thou shalt in thy daughter see, this picture, once, resembled thee,’ ” replied Cinderella simply. They had probably thought that she was not even educated enough to read, let alone writers such as Ambrose Philips himself.  
  
“Are you proud of yourself for becoming me, then?” sneered Lady Tremaine.  
  
Cinderella did not flinch. “I have not become you. You tried to form me, but no longer will you do so. This is the end.” She glanced to the guards standing at the far end of the corridor, staying where she had told them to. It did not do to eavesdrop on the Queen. Slowly she turned back to her stepmother once again. “You laid your own path to hell. And I doubt that your intentions were good at all.”  
  
Without waiting for a response, she turned away. None followed her, and she allowed herself the faintest of smiles as her past slipped into silence behind her.


End file.
